GUYS BUT NOW I CAN WORK EVEN FASTER AND EFFICIENT! I DON’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT SAVING BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS IN CLOUD! IT’S ALWAYS AVAILABLE! WINDOWS IS MOST USED SOFTWARE ON MARKET!
The breaking point for me was when I was showered with Copilot+ pop-ups on every single hover. Let me fucking copy/cut/paste/format in peace. I never asked for any of this, and neither did any user of any level of expertise.
Switched to OnlyOffice as it felt to perfectly answer my needs. There are still some quirks with non-UTF-8 documents, but you know what, I’d rather iron those issues out than be shoved a product I didn’t request nor need at every single interaction I have.
I highly encourage anyone that hasn’t done already to explore alternatives to the M*crosoft Suite, if they haven’t done it by now. Every update is just the worst form of enshittification known to humankind. Can’t wait to have an intrusive slop AI agent tell me how to do my Maths in the Calculator app next.
Let apps be just apps again 🗣️🗣️📢
Jesus christ. So glad I ditched MS. It’s like getting out of a cult - once you see it looking in from the outside, you finally realize how terrible it is.
Holy fucking shit, what absolute trash
This made my blood boil, and then I remembered I switched to Linux a month ago… all good.
At this point that’s almost like ransomware.
Why I use libreoffice.
If you mind that Word documents are stored in the cloud by default, you need to modify the default setting
…or just use some other app for your private documents and Word only for work-related stuff or such. I use Word/Office at work and have absolutely no issue with all the documentation being saved in the cloud. But for private stuff I would have to think twice if I want this.
Not to be used to train AI. We promise.
LLM’s out here running wild. How Rude.Maybe I should switch to Linux again.
They’d break SO MANY international and data security laws if they tried breaking into people’s OneDrive, it’d be hilarious to see the number of lawsuits they’d lose by default.
they’re probably already doing that to a smaller degree, and slightly protecting themselves with an obscure clause in their TOS. besides, you only lose lawsuits if you get caught - and churning things through AI is a great way to erase any fingerprints that identifies stolen data
they’re probably already doing that to a smaller degree, and slightly protecting themselves with an obscure clause in their TOS
As soon as you find proof, you have literally free money up for the taking at any court.
you only lose lawsuits if you get caught - and churning things through AI is a great way to erase any fingerprints that identifies stolen data
That’s… not how any of this works…
an obscure clause in TOS won’t be a small print of an evil villain speech exposing their plot in clear wording. what it would be is something worded vaguely enough to make things seem like the end user technically agreed to what was being done, it could also be an “and” where you expected “or”, or an ommision of a specific thing… my point being - it’s always going to be a technicality that in case of a lawsuit would be a valid defence in the eyes of law
it very much is how it works though? show me a lawsuit someone lost before they got caught commiting a crime. and how would you even go about proving that your unpublished documents were used to train AI? even an entire life’s work of one person is just a speck in the training data, it’s impossible to definitively prove your work was stolen and used to train an AI. besides there will always be plausible deniability that the AI just made shit up that happened to look kinda like what you once wrote
an obscure clause in TOS won’t be a small print of an evil villain speech exposing their plot in clear wording. what it would be is something worded vaguely enough to make things seem like the end user technically agreed to what was being done
That means nothing. Illegal terms can’t be enforced in contracts or terms of service.
it’s always going to be a technicality that in case of a lawsuit would be a valid defence in the eyes of law
No. Written law always takes precedence. If they spied on your data stored in OneDrive, they’d lose by default the moment the case hit the courthouse.
As for your second paragraph: yeah, I agree. If they did that, the damage would’ve already been done. But it would kill the business once found out. The benefit is not worth the risk.
For example: you’re saying that they would use it to train AI, right?
They don’t train AI. They get a trained model from OpenAI.
This might be when I finally jump ship and go to Linux. I should do Mint, right?
Some executive noticed that they can’t sell you larger cloud storage if you haven’t used it up.
Then someone on the office copilot team said they wished they had access to more comprehensive data about what people write with office apps and the rest is history.
To anyone thinking “LibreOffice still has issues”, here’s the LibreOffice donation page to help them fix it up and be rid of MS Office forever.
You have to click through to a third save dialogue just to choose “Browse my files…”.
https://www.libreoffice.org/ for anyone who wants microsoft to stop messing with their office apps.
There is also only office which has better compatibility with MSOffice file types
This here.
I wish Only Office got as much fanfare as LibreOffice. The UI is much closer to Microsoft Office and it tends to have better compatibility.
I have both installed though and use them both lol.
OnlyOffice is Russian-owned, via a holding company in Singapore. When Russia invaded Ukraine and sanctions threatened the business, they obfuscated this, but it’s still Lev Bannov’s product.
The importance you attach to this is up to you, but they try quite hard to hide it.
Mm knowing that makes me never want to go anywhere near OnlyOffice now, oof.
LibreOffice has a ribbon UI too.
TIL! Thank you, kind stranger!
Gerne!
That it does :)
LibreOffice is awesome too. No complaints really.
I tried it years ago and it was pretty garbage. Took forever to load. Looked like shit. Has this changed?
Libreoffice their latest blogpost is from the 20th of August 2025. There have been a few releases in the past few months as well.
Openoffice their latest ( Apache Openoffice 4.1.15 ) was released almost 2 years ago ( December 2023 ).
Libreoffice seems like a more recent, better supported tool over Openoffice which hasn’t seen any updates since 2023 according to their own website.
I’m on my phone, so I didn’t search extensively. But I think that also plays a role in why there’s a much larger fanbase for libreoffice rather than Openoffice.
I’ve no recent experience with either so I can’t comment on how well either works.
Edit: I looked up the wrong one. My statement remains correct w.r.t. Openoffice, but they mentioned Onlyoffice which is a different product.
I believe Open Office and Only Office are different products.
Only Office had a major release in June, 2025.
And you are correct that Open Office last update was back in December 2023.
openoffice is an apache project, created when oracle gave them the code and rights to the openoffice project. ibm later donated symphony to them. anyone familiar with apache knows they do things their own way, and usually slowly.
libreoffice originated from a fork when openoffice’s status under oracle was in doubt. it progresses faster than apache, as most developers also switched.
onlyoffice is an entirely different application. decent enough, but with its own quirks. it can also be slow on lower-spec systems due to the heavy reliance on js. originally a latvian-russian project, it was reorganized (via new corporate entities in uk and sg) to hide the russian ties for ‘reasons’.
Ah I see. Thanks for the information. I use both LibreOffice and OnlyOffice and generally am happy with both. I kind of just bounce around back and forth.
Man, wouldn’t it be nice if both of our counties didn’t have ridiculous propaganda and fascism so that we could just cooperate on shit like this without having to worry as much about maliciousness on a state level?
You are correct. I misread ( or my brain farted ) and looked up the wrong one.
Downside is ties to Russia and performance is really bad, as I understand it’s an Electron web app, not a native application. It also won’t save to network shares properly and will lose your file if you do.
Don’t ever save your files directly on a samba share with only office. Lost hours of work twice . It doesn’t keep recovery files.
I second this. There’s a little bit of a learning curve on some of the functionality, but it’s not bad at all. And most of the functionality is very easy to find. I moved over to Libre Office several years ago and it’s been great.
Office would have a learning curve too if you hadn’t been using it since you were a child.
Tbf it was simplier back when people first used it
When people were first using it they were coming from DOS or older machines. Many were using a mouse for the first time. It wasn’t simpler to them.
This is very true. I hadn’t used Microsoft Office since 2007 and at my new workplace everyone’s using it. It’s really hard and I don’t find anything. Yesterday I was working with tables but I gave up and had IT install libreoffice instead.
You can now enable a tabbed interface similar to Microsoft Office